The Boy Who Wanted the British Court to Listen
On 8 April 1929, two young men walked into the visitors’ gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. During a debate on a public safety bill that would give the British government sweeping powers of arrest, they stood up and threw two smoke bombs into an empty area of the chamber. Nobody was hurt. The bombs were deliberately placed to injure no one. Then the two men stayed exactly where they were, shouted the slogan Inquilab Zindabad, and threw pamphlets into the air.
They wanted to be arrested. They wanted a trial. They wanted, above all, a courtroom where they could tell the British and the Indian people what they believed. The older of the two was Batukeshwar Dutt. The younger, twenty one years old, was Bhagat Singh.
This is the story of the young man who used his own hanging to change how India thought about freedom.
The Boy from Banga
Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district in Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. His father Kishan Singh and his uncle Ajit Singh were both members of the Ghadar movement, an early revolutionary organisation that sought to overthrow British rule. Bhagat Singh grew up in a household where jail was not something to be feared. It was almost a family tradition.
He was thirteen when the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919. General Reginald Dyer opened fire on a peaceful gathering in Amritsar, killing hundreds of unarmed Indians. Bhagat Singh visited the site the next morning and, according to family accounts, took home a handful of the earth stained with the blood of the dead. He kept that soil for years. Something changed in him that day.
The Turn Towards Revolution
At the National College in Lahore, Bhagat Singh read everything he could find on revolutionary movements. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Giuseppe Mazzini and the Italian Risorgimento. The Irish nationalists. The Russian anarchists. American writers on democracy and inequality. He was a serious, disciplined reader. His letters to friends show a mind trying to understand exactly what kind of country India should become after independence.
In 1926, he helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, an organisation for young people that argued for complete independence from Britain and for equality of all religions. In 1928, he joined the Hindustan Republican Association, which under his influence was renamed the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. The word socialist mattered to him. He believed political freedom was hollow without economic freedom.
The Killing of Saunders
In October 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai, one of the most respected Indian nationalist leaders, led a peaceful protest in Lahore against the Simon Commission, a British body that included no Indian members. The police, led by Superintendent James Scott, attacked the demonstrators with lathis. Lala Lajpat Rai was beaten badly. He died on 17 November 1928.
Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the HSRA decided that Scott would be killed in retaliation. On 17 December 1928, they targeted him outside a police station in Lahore. In the confusion, they shot the wrong man. They killed John Saunders, another British officer.
Bhagat Singh escaped Lahore in disguise, shaving his beard and cutting his hair, an unusual thing for a Sikh man, to slip past the police. He hid in various places across India for four months.
The Assembly Bombing
By early 1929, Bhagat Singh believed the movement needed something bigger than assassinations. It needed a public trial. It needed the British to try him in open court, so he could use the trial as a platform to speak to India.
On 8 April 1929, he and Batukeshwar Dutt executed the plan at the Central Legislative Assembly. The pamphlets they scattered contained the famous line, “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear”. They surrendered peacefully. They wanted to be caught. They wanted the courtroom.
The Long Trial
The trial that followed dragged on for two years. Bhagat Singh was sentenced to transportation for life for the Assembly bombing. But then the British police connected him to the Saunders murder as well. A new trial began in Lahore, called the Lahore Conspiracy Case. This time the charge was murder. The punishment, if convicted, was death.
Bhagat Singh used the courtroom exactly as he had planned. His speeches were reported across India. His writings from jail, including Why I Am an Atheist, spread among students and revolutionaries. His hunger strikes, undertaken to demand better treatment for political prisoners, made front page news for weeks. In the summer of 1929, his comrade Jatin Das died in prison after a 63 day hunger strike. The public response was enormous.
A generation of Indians who had never heard of Bhagat Singh two years earlier now followed his trial every day. He was still only twenty two.
The Hanging
On 23 March 1931, Bhagat Singh was hanged at Lahore Central Jail along with his comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev. He was twenty three years old. The hanging was carried out at 7:33 in the evening, a day earlier than scheduled and eleven hours before the official time, apparently to avoid the crowds that were forming outside the jail.
The bodies were cremated in secret at Hussainiwala on the banks of the Sutlej River. When word of the hanging reached the public, protests broke out in every major Indian city. Schools closed. Newspapers printed black borders.
What He Left Behind
Bhagat Singh was not the leader of the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi was. Nehru was. Subhas Chandra Bose was. What Bhagat Singh gave the movement was something different. He showed a generation of Indians that a young person, from a middle class family, with no army and no wealth, could refuse to accept the terms of British rule and could make the British take him seriously.
His writings are still read today. His portrait, in the yellow turban with the light moustache and the intense eyes, hangs in student hostels, in party offices, in barbershops. The line Inquilab Zindabad, which he did not invent but did make famous, is still used at Indian rallies of every political colour.
He did not live to see 1947. But every Indian who did lived in a country whose imagination he had helped to shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Bhagat Singh born?
Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district, in what is now Pakistan. His birth anniversary is celebrated across India every year.
Why did Bhagat Singh throw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly?
On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two smoke bombs in the Assembly to protest a public safety bill. The bombs were placed to hurt no one. Their goal was to get arrested and use the trial as a platform to speak to India about complete independence.
When was Bhagat Singh hanged?
Bhagat Singh was hanged at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931, along with his comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev. He was twenty three years old. The date is now observed across India as Shaheed Diwas.
Who else was hanged with Bhagat Singh?
Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged along with Bhagat Singh at the same time on 23 March 1931 at Lahore Central Jail. All three had been convicted in the Lahore Conspiracy Case.
What did Bhagat Singh believe politically?
Bhagat Singh was a socialist and an atheist. He believed that political freedom from British rule was only the first step. Real freedom, he wrote, required ending economic exploitation and the caste system as well. His essay Why I Am an Atheist, written in prison, remains one of the clearest statements of his beliefs.
Sources and Further Reading
- Sanyal, Jitendra Nath, Sardar Bhagat Singh, a biography by his contemporary
- Nayar, Kuldip, The Martyr, Bhagat Singh Experiments in Revolution, Har Anand Publications
- Singh, Bhagat, Why I Am an Atheist, in The Jail Notebook and Other Writings, LeftWord Books
- Government of India, National Archives, records of the Lahore Conspiracy Case
